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a critique of sharpening technique

i know im still new here, and very well could get shunned for saying this, but its worth it. so here we go.

ive always hated how in culinary school they taught you that a steel sharpens a knife, and when you get out into the real world you realize it doesnt, and you have to learn a whole mew set of rules for using stones. thousands of methods, and ALL of them mean scratching your knives while learning. i HATE those scuff marks. but i thought this was the way it had to be, so i just went along with it. im decently good, i can get a blade shaving sharp quickly enough. but when i was asked to be a Teaching assistant, i didnt want to overwhelm kids on learning to sharpen knives, so ive been looking for a good alternative. i think i found a better one.

i picked up a set of MAC ceramic steels (white 1200gr. and black 2000gr.) and quickly realized that they sharpen knives. they dont take off a whole lot of metal, but a DMT diamond steel does. in total, it comes to around $100, which may buy you two stones. and the 2000gr. MAC steel makes, in my opinion, a PERFECT finishing edge on a kitchen knife, and ive used it as a hone for about a year.

in short, i found that for me a set of abrasive rods work alot better than various stones. its just my opinion, and i thought id put it out there for you guys to try.

It can work(many people do it), but it's not the same thing as keeping an edge sharp.

There are basically 2 different sets of skills, one for sharp knives and one for "servicable" knives. Dull means it won't cut. But Sharp doesn't mean "not dull". Take a look at this guy:http://youtu.be/o6tu0Zugn1w

Could I make a cucumber shark? Sure.
Could I do the cuts he's doing the exact same way? Nope.

He surprised me because he is using knives that look like they've never been sharpened and never will be, and doesn't seem impaired in his technique--he has used sorta-kinda-sharp knives for so many years he's mastered them, and cuts toward himself in a pen grip and grabs his edges with abandon.

I don't keep my edges falling through food, but it's certainly way beyond a 1200 grit hone finish. I put an edge on a Victorinox chef's at work yesterday when cutting 30lbs of new potatoes into tiny pieces. Took me over an hour. I used my knife today to cut up the other 20lbs, and it didn't take me 20 minutes. Neither time I was really rushing. But I don't have the skill set for using less-than-sharp knives.

Personally, I don't think "servicable" is acceptable, because it degrades food quality and can be fairly dangerous. But as far as "better than various stones"...sure there is a TON of garbage out there. Thanks to dishwashers, frozen meals, fast food, and overzealous marketing, standards have fallen so low that people are basically cutting with spatulas and can be impressed by pretty much ANYTHING.

I think you should teach kids how to sharpen. You have a knife skills class, right? A knife skills class should include a methodical approach to basic sharpening. This may sound like knife-nut mentality, but taking excellent care of your tools was once integral to the American spirit--the one that created the mystique we've been riding down for a century. There are 2 ways a cook interacts with food that make up 99.9% of cooking: heat and knifework. They should, as cooks, understand how the knife works and why. Honing rods do not instruct well--they give off a Gordon Ramsay image of a guy battering a knife to look "serious".

If you need to hone your knife to get it through one day, something is wrong.

But you know, you can avoid the scuffs on the face altogether by sharpening at a higher angle, especially on softer steel like that. It's far less important to have the edge steep than it is to have it aligned properly.

and i didnt mean a hone, i meant using them in place of a stone. diamond and ceramic are both abrasive, and remove metal, much the same way stones do. its not just realigning an edge, its actually removing metal, and putting a new edge on the blade. it works really well. im not saying stones are overrated, they're definately quicker, but for kids that are just being exposed to culinary arts, and barely know the differenece between a French knife and a bread knife, its easier for them to learn one method, and different tools for different results.

The problem with these sort of shortcuts is that the edge gradually degrades to the point that the knife needs to be replaced. With cheap knives it isn't that big a deal, I suppose. I bought a chef's kit from a pawn shop once, and the knife with the bolster down to the edge had been shortcutted to the point that it was no longer useable. Why not just sell all of the students Harbor Frieght beltsanders? Then they can grind edges in seconds.

Spike C
"The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain."
Pirsig